MYSTERIES LEFT BY WAR.

Taihape Daily Times, 30 April 1919, Page 2

MYSTERIES LEFT BY WAR.

The war is leaving behind a whole mass of mysteries that may never be cleared up. I have been told of a woman married to a member of one of the overseas units who received a letter from her husband staling that he was so sick of life that ho intended to “meet the bullet” in the next ‘stunt’ at about the same time that she received a notification that he had bee;* killed in action —a fortnight, before the date upon the letter (says the London correspouu/crft of the “XcW> York Herald, ”)

Inquiries were instituted but it was only by an accidental identification in hospital that the husband was found to be alive, using another soldier’s paybook and papers—a soldier, who, by a quick exchange of identification payers and discs, had died in his name.

Subsequently the soldier confessed that on an impulse to start Hfe afresh he had seized upon this means of “dying,” the farewell letter with its foolish mistake in the date being an afterthought. But the war will have "given many more careful men, who for some reason or another desired to disappear, an opoprtunity; and very possibly a number of m6u who were reported raising, and subsequently presumed dead, arc still alive.

In an infantry battalion which was continually in action, and in which officers and men were going out wounded and sick, and coming in as reinscarcely time to get to know eacU other, a man desiring to do so could forccments, so rapidly that they had easily arrange his disappearance. Practically every military headquarters has its record qf women wbo refuse to accept official intimation of their husband)'s death, and in many cases claim to have evidence of the “dead” being seen. ■ •